30 March 2016
Investigating the merger between a university and an art college, while the authors were most interested on instances of potential innovative knowledge combinations at inter-disciplinary spaces, they found that at the administrative side of the merger something interesting was happening. While administrative routines were mostly unidirectionally adopted by the art college, being by far the smaller institution, the authors observed that few routines from the old college survived post-merger. Reading through the routines literature, they found that it is well-argued, through agency, that routine participants may change/resist the change in the performances of routines. However, while an appealing concept in discussing routines’ change and stability, agency, in itself, does not suffice to explain why certain changes can be actualised while others cannot.
In a forthcoming British Journal of Management paper, the authors borrowed Bourdieu’s theory of practice to explain the observed phenomenon fuller-fledged. The findings suggest that the differences in routines’ responses to a merger initiative can be explained by employing the concepts of field and symbolic capital to unpack power relations in the context of organisational routines. The authors find that (a) the field within which a routine operates and (b) the actors’ symbolic capital and position-taking during change implementation shape routines’ responses to organisational change initiatives. This provides new insights into the power dynamics of organisational routines going through exogenous changes.